So I bought a used T420 with 6 gigs of RAM on flee-bay and have fallen in love with IBM/Lenovo thinkpads because of it. After upgrading to an SSD, running Ubuntu, it’s a real pleasure to use.
I’m running VMware workstation pro when I do need a windows machine- and though it does work, I can’t help but wonder if it could be better.
Come to find out it’s a thing to put some select i7s in it. IMO going from the 2 core i5 to a four core would help the VMs greatly (and maybe a bit more RAM), but what do you guys think? Would the deminishing gains curve (ram speed, other bottlenecks etc) give a less than impressive result? I’m looking at the i7 2820qm
Are you sure you can get the 2820 to work in it? Thats 10 more watts TDP than the i5. The cooling will suffer. Perhaps LM might be in order for the swap. The 2630qm is a lower clock version that might serve better in that regard.
Not 110% but there seem to be a number of people that have done it and the mb, battery, power supply, cooling hardware etc had the over head to be good for it. I’m curious about perceived gains- I think the i5 has better single core performance- with the SSD the laptop is plenty snappy except for the win10 VM
Yeah gave it two cores, ample ram. It’s not really bad, but if a little better would be nice. In fact it would be daily drivable for pretty much everything I do, I would only need my desktop for big nested labs. I’d like to stick with VMware simply to stay current with it. Also looking at the 2670qm.